Abstract This essay is a close philosophical reading of Philippe Grandrieux's expanded video production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, first commissioned by the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen in Belgium where it premiered in spring 2023. The argument takes its conceptual and analytical inspiration from Gilles Deleuze's account of sensation in The Logic of Sensation and his seminars on painting, with special attention to Grandrieux's refashioning of desire and the female body in terms of its potential figural multiplicities. Grandrieux's work inspires a question: What is an Image? Not an image or images, all of which belong to the domain of representation, but rather the figural Image in its power and complexity.
Abstract This essay reads Eve Kosofsky's Sedgwick's memoir A Dialogue on Love to unfold several aspects of her poetics: an erotics of bristling criticism, an ethics of delicate attention, and a politics of rescue acutely aware of its own destructive impulses and motives. It proposes the ongoing relevance of her commitment to a personal voice that walks the line between intimacy and criticism, and that is oriented toward ecological questions of system and environment, of survival, nourishment, and poeisis.
Abstract Prosopopoeia defines legal and discursive efforts to cognize, and to exempt ourselves from, extinction. The figure of the Anthropocene, for instance, fits a human mask onto the modulation of life and nonlife down to geological substrata; it personifies destructive ideologies (such as nuclear colonialism and imperialism) and their remediation and redemption (such as a present consciousness and a present conscience born backward from the future apocalypse). Albert Serra's 2022 film Pacifiction, the foremost of three case studies, denaturalizes the brutal mechanisms through which combinations of particularities and differences—such as the figure of the racialized and transfeminine sex worker—are made to signify global destitution. To deface late liberalism is to treat the reproduction of its regime as a set of foundationless discursive and aesthetic maneuvers.
Abstract This paper attends to disordered eating not simply as a socially determined malady but as a form of maladjusted and disorderly embodiment that engenders relations both social and antisocial. While indigestion appears in one respect as an eminently individualized process—playing out as it does, inside the gut—it reveals, when considered as method, a social dimension of disordered eating that has been largely elided in accounts of its causes or cures. Working against conventional feminist and medical conceptualizations of nonnormative eating practices as pathological and in need of extinguishment, the authors draw on insights from trans studies, mad studies, and critical disability studies to counter the notion that food and social life are inextricable and uniformly positive, and to elaborate and offer (anti-)social strategies of restriction, reversal, and rage. Rather than framing eating as an act intrinsically attached to conviviality, the paper presents a range of possibilities for collective corporeal and social indigestion.
Abstract This essay reconstructs and reconsiders a lineage of work in feminist sts and new materialism that inherits from Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's writings on microbial sexuality. Several feminist and queer theorists have argued that our conceptions of sex and gender could be expanded or liberated by learning new sexual possibilities from bacteria. These projects surreptitiously impose traditional sexual categories in order to claim that bacteria escape them; they show the oppressive and liberatory positions to be nonoppositional. This article turns to deconstruction to think through the consequences of this nonoppositionality. A deconstruction of life science and sexual difference challenges the pretense of “new materialist” research to receive from nature, matter, or life what depends on the active intervention of a reading. Nonetheless, this deconstructive practice of reading also destabilizes the foundations of “poststructuralist” accounts of sex and gender, such as Judith Butler's, which argues that culture “produces” nature.
Abstract Near the end of Jean-Luc Nancy's Birth to Presence, Psyche is nearly inhumed in a coffin that the French philosopher leaves slightly open. This one-page scene retraces how an imagined colonial tradition can reduce Psyche to soul, Eros's lover, Aristotle's principle of animal life, and Freud's psychical apparatus. Aspects of Psyche as a gendered colonial projection, an invented other, and a refracted mirror are at once reflected and recalled in various scenes from Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, Hélène Cixous's “Albertine disparue,” and Heinrich von Kleist's “The Puppet Theatre.” While Nancy's text “Psyche” gestures towards an interment of the colonial canon as it knows itself, a reading protocol can be gleamed from Cixous, Proust, and Kleist, whose works call on readers to confront their own violent obsession with knowing and transfixing their many invented “others.”
Abstract In order to preface the question that was asked of the contributors to this issue of differences (“for whom do we read?”), it seemed necessary to introduce the notion of the readee, the addressee of reading (with all the misdirections that such an address can involve). Absent from the theories of reading, the readee is nonetheless omnipresent, encountered or silently presupposed everywhere, recognizable in historical documents and painted reading scenes.
Abstract This essay discusses scenes of reading and stealing entangled in the first two books of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions and in Edgar Allan Poe's short story “The Purloined Letter.”
Abstract This paper argues for the usefulness of Bakhtin's concept of the superaddressee to adjudicating debates at the intersection of black literary studies and novel theory. Reframing Bakhtin's theory of a third-party addressee that stands outside and above the social order allows for a new way of thinking about the function of rhetorical address with respect to arguments advanced by Kenneth Warren and Stephen Best about the value and coherence of group identity, signifying practices, traditionalism and innovation, and historicity. Similarities and divergences with the Bakhtinian definition are examined in a series of readings that range across canonical texts in the black literary tradition, including slave narratives and abolitionist writings, with a special emphasis on the modern novel, including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and selected examples from contemporary fiction, including Vinson Cunningham's Great Expectations and Raven Leilani's Luster.
Abstract This essay asks why nineteenth-century British children's fiction locates illiteracy in the West Indies. I compare abolitionists’ accusation that planters mistake the bodily work of looking at books for the mental effort of understanding them with post-Emancipation debates about the balance of power between a woman who reads aloud and a man who listens. Finally, I ask how that dyad changes once proxy reading becomes confined to two scenarios: an upper-middle-class parent reading to a child or a paid voice actor recording audiobooks for a multitasking consumer.
Abstract This essay explores the practice of detecting crucial signs in unexpectedly encountered words and sentences. Beginning with Walter Benjamin, who presents “reading pure and simple” as the grasping of fleeting likenesses that alter the perceiver, the article treats three exemplary scenes of hearing and seeing in Augustine, Descartes, and Leibniz that suggest that the interpretation of apparently circumstantial scraps of discourse can exert a life-changing power, for better and for worse.
Abstract What is the difference between reading and “giving a reading”? This essay explores that question and the different forms of approaching it given by anthropology and literary criticism while examining letters sent from underground by informal miners who have been the object of state-sponsored sieges in South Africa. It considers these brief missives against the backdrop of a rich tradition of letter-writing and reading by migrant miners (where epistles are frequently read aloud and in public), as well as the solicitation of affidavits for cases brought on behalf of the miners in human rights cases. Attentive to the mediatic status of the letters as they circulate in the mass media, the essay explores a history of theorizing reading and authorship as either a demand or a condemnation of “literalness” and explores the relationship between this demand or condemnation and the problem of demetaphorization in accusations of inhumanity, especially as it gets coded as cannibalism.
Abstract The struggle for sovereign reading is constitutive of Caribbean literature, and the long durée of colonialism and postcolonialism mean that it is still a current topic. In the Anglophone Caribbean, writers such as George Lamming, C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, Austin Clarke, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jamaica Kincaid, and Michelle Cliff have all put the formation of the reading subject at the heart of Caribbean self-making. But it is only with Dionne Brand's An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading that we have an explicit theory of Caribbean, ethical reader-response criticism. In response to Brand's essay, this article considers the idea of reading for one's mother as a governing metaphor in Caribbean literature and the ironies and problems with this metaphor as theorized in the works of three Anglophone Caribbean women writers: Jamaica Kincaid, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dionne Brand.
Abstract An inquiry into the structure of address in Marx's Capital, a book that is read by but not for the one reading it. Instead, a reader of Capital reads it for a collective that does not yet exist. What's more, it will always be read in a displacing way, insofar as, once the collective exists, it won't need to be read any longer. However, reading for the proletariat should not be confused with advocacy. Rather than advocacy, reading Capital is an act of evocacy, of reading the proletariat into existence.
Abstract This essay tracks the history and theory of the critical reading as it emerged from structuralism, poststructuralism, and reception theory and prepared the ground for contemporary debates around postcritical reading, “sovereign reading” (as theorized by Peter Szendy), and what is referred to as “reading fore”—in the sense of preparing for or setting up a reading that conjures an absent subject through vocative modes of address. Drawing on Barbara Johnson's signal essay “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” which focused on Gwendolyn Brooks's address to “abortions” as the object of apostrophe in her poem “The Mother,” this essay considers the figure of the text's addressee as a kind of pre-person or unborn subject impossible to disentangle from the politics of reproductive justice.
This introduction to the special issue Lyric beyond Containment does not propose to redefine lyric. Nor does it seek to inaugurate a new turn in literary criticism; this is not the “new new lyric studies.” Instead, it argues that lyric tropes, such as the speaking “I,” the address to an absent or anthropomorphized other, or the brief glimpse of finely wrought feeling, prove fruitful in theorizing material, historical, political, and literary forms of subjectivity, personhood, relationality, and reciprocity. Whereas these tropes have too often been yoked to the decontextualized figure of the poetic speaker, this introduction suggests that they are vital tools for moving beyond notions of the poem as a closed aesthetic object, held apart from society. Moreover, these tropes occur across a broad range of genres, which are themselves illuminated through engagement with lyric theory. Building on important scholarship by critics including Julia Bloch, Jonathan Culler, Andy Hines, Virginia Jackson, Kamran Javadizadeh, Anthony Reed, Dorothy Wang, and Gillian White, the authors suggest that in lyric, and in lyric reading, language’s opacity contains generative possibilities for the theorization of social relations.
This essay is a study of black poesis in the critical and theoretical project of George Jackson and its attempt to differentiate itself from carcerality (at the level of word, concept, and genre). In the process, Jackson’s radical attempt to undo, disrupt, and displace all forms of fascist authority (even his own) offers an unparalleled challenge to how blackness is oppressed and how it often oppresses itself, in not only law and politics but also language and rhetoric. Accordingly, this essay recasts Jackson’s relation to European philosophy—Jean Genet, Gilles Deleuze—and to the black radical tradition.
This essay offers a lyric reading of Hannah Black’s novella, Tuesday or September or the End, to argue that strategies of lyric figuration serve to mark the difference between the real movement of history and its representations. Noting the speculative dimensions of Marx’s own analysis, the author compares Fredric Jameson’s and Carolyn Lesjak’s spatial accounts of incommensurable temporalities to Fred Moten’s lyric concept of the “notin-between” to highlight a surprising coherence between Marxist and lyric methods for figuring the dialectical interference of distinct striations of time. Reading lyric dialectically, the essay argues, allows us to apprehend moments of recognition in their simultaneously negative character and to locate ourselves within large and unknown systems. Lyric strategies thus bring both the “real” of value relations and the production of difference into figuration as dialectical moments within a moving system—one in which the capitalist time of value production is spatially imposed through colonial encounters.
This essay reads Margaret Christakos’s Her Paraphernalia, particularly its use of photography, social media posts, family archives, memoir, and poetry to consider how Christakos’s intergenre memoir extends her investigation into experimental feminist lyric. Her Paraphernalia extends Christakos’s longstanding interest in lyric form by drawing lyric into relation with a wide array of genres and modes of expression in her investigation into selfhood as mediated—and problematized—through both lyric and antilyric modalities. Her development of a lyric eye/I, enacted through her deployment of photography, is a key aspect of her book’s engagement with lyric as an intersubjective mode of expression. The notion of paraphernalia—what belongs to a woman outside of her dowry—functions as an organizing concept throughout the work and is connected to Christakos’s exploration of a lyric I that lies outside of heteropatriarchal and capitalist structures of lineage, marriage, and property.
Exploring the curious intermingling of verse lines and color lines, this essay considers whether the demands placed on contemporary African American poets by their fans and critics are a response to the challenges that these authors’ texts present to traditional ideas about lyric self-expression and the lawfulness of language. Juxtaposing several pieces from a thirteen-poem sequence by Hanif Abdurraqib called “How can black people write about flowers at a time like this” with Ross Gay’s “weeping,” the author argues that the lyric impulse both articulates and dissolves the logics by which it is judged. In the final analysis, we can never be sure whether we are policing poetry or poetry is policing us.
